


A Homecoming

by Anonymous



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/F, No Dialogue, Quadruple Drabble, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 13:20:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11921751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Berúthiel goes back to the desert, and to her love.





	A Homecoming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amyfortuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyfortuna/gifts).



She leaves the dunes behind, rising and falling in their dark golden splendour under the morning sun. The desert gently declines towards the oasis, the sand meandering like silent waves of a river towards a small, deep-blue lake, a perfect mirror of the cloudless sky. 

The journey has been long, and exhausting. Berúthiel has never stopped longer than necessary since she left the sea behind, and there have been sandstorms, but she knows the desert like she knows her own emotions: insidious, turbulent and unforgiving, but true to those with the shrewdness and the passion to negotiate with it, and not underestimate it.

The camel hurries over the last few paces that separate her from the three adobe buildings nestled among shrubs to one side of the lake. She hopes that the one she seeks is there, as her heart tells her, that she can make her home in one of the buildings, and never ever leave this place where everything speaks to her soul again.

As she grows closer, she notices a lone figure standing between two palm trees, the one taller the other shorter, a blotch of red and black and bright yellow against the dark green of the shrubbery. Her heart skips a beat, her whole upper body gives a start.

She grows closer and closer, but it doesn't feel fast enough. When at last she is close enough she shields her eyes to see better. 

Her love, her life, is standing right before her, as if she knew, as if she had been waiting for her. As if she had been away a mere few days, and the lone, veiled and cloaked traveller could be no-one but her.

Her love's eyes shine like opals, her skin is the colour of the sand, and her charcoal tresses fall on her chest from under her wide bead-studded veil. Her dress reveals the shape of her body, the never-forgotten, beloved shape Berúthiel always hankered for, and always always imagined to hold in the countless lonely loveless nights of her years in Gondor. 

Her love smiles while she dismounts, takes a single step forward and opens her arms as if saying 'welcome back'. The weight of her years in Gondor evaporates like a thin sheet of water under the desert sun. 'Berúthiel' is swept away; she feels light and happy, crushingly happy, as she throws herself in her love's hold.

**Author's Note:**

> 'Berúthiel' was very likely not the lady's real name.


End file.
